Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [182]
“I know nothing about explosives,” Susan said. “I know nothing about the motives of criminal, drunken, brutal men, nothing about the working of mines, nothing about how it feels to be beaten up or to hold off a gang of thugs with a Winchester. Oliver keeps all that to himself, he thinks I should be protected from it.”
Another quick clash with the dark eyes. Augusta’s mouth was pursed, her brows raised as if she asked a question. You see? Susan meant to tell her. I’ll defend him. I declare his right to be.
“But I nursed poor Pricey,” she said to Thomas. “They broke his nose and his cheekbone and kicked out his front teeth and hurt his head so that he was never right afterward.”
“I believe your qualifications are adequate,” Thomas said with his slow smile. “How about the engineer and the young lady? Wedding bells?”
“I . . . don’t know. I don’t think so. She has been raised in the East, she is altogether above her father, though he was once a gentleman. I think, don’t you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn’t bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father’s death. No matter how much she was in love with him.”
“An unhappy ending?” Augusta said. “Oh, Sue, why?”
Susan’s oppression had grown until she felt she would shrink away to nothing under the weight of it. Her story, barbarous to begin with, and hence open to Augusta’s unspoken scorn, was silly when told from the woman’s point of view, and hence open to her own. It was as if Mr. James should write a dime novel. And Thomas’s imperturbable consideration could not warm away the chill. She knew that with Oliver in New York an evening like this would simply not have happened. The one time they had gone together to dine, the studio had been full of dark spaces, uncomfortable silences, too much trying on both sides.
“Isn’t that the way things do end?” she said–she threw it at Augusta like a stone.
Again Thomas rescued them; his tact was clairvoyant. “However it ends, we must have it,” he said, and yawned and sat up straight. His smile was of a steady, incomparable sweetness. Susan had tried many times to draw it; she thought it the friendliest and gentlest and most understanding expression she had ever seen on a human face. “Isn’t anyone else tired? It’s nearly two.”
“I am,” Susan said. “Terribly, all of a sudden.”
Promptly, with a queenly rustling of taffeta, Augusta rose from her hassock, and in an instant, in a look, everything was right again, all the love that had radiated through the familiar room until five minutes ago was restored. It was like coming out of chilly woods into sunlight. “We’ve kept you up too long,” Augusta said. “It was utterly stupid of us. You shouldn’t be allowed to overdo.”
Through a danger of tears, with lips gone suddenly trembly, Susan said, “How could either of you two ever be thoughtless? It’s beyond your capacity.”
They went with their arms around one another to Susan’s bedroom door, and there they stopped. Augusta was inches taller than Susan, and her bearing made her taller than she was. Her dark eyebrows were bent in a slight frown; her hair came in a dark wave across her forehead. The moment of her breathing woke a diamond like a blue-green firefly in the hollow of her throat. She took Susan by the arms. “Sue, are you happy?”
“Happy? It’s been one of the happiest evenings of my life.”
“I don’t mean tonight.”
“Of course,” Susan said steadily. “I’m very happy.”
“This young man, Frank Sargent, does he mean anything to you?”
“He’s a friend,” Susan said, and steadied her eyes on Augusta’s face, conscious of a faint astonishment. “He’s ten years younger than I am. Anyway I’ll probably never see him again.”
“You wanted this child that’s coming?”
“Yes.”
“Does Oliver know about it?”
“Not yet.”
The dark head bent toward her, the dark eyes narrowed, glowing with a question, the jewel winked in the hollow throat. “Why not?”
“Why not? Well, first he was in Denver and Leadville,